Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Seat mounts

So the ECU wiring is in, and should hopefully work. I won't know for certain if it functions correctly until I actually get a motor (with manifolds etc intact) in to the car. The existing unit in the car is partially disassembled and was only fitted for sizing and mount building purposes.

In yet another tangent from the task immediately at hand, we started to work on a few other parts of the car needing attention. Firstly we are making seat mounts. I initially removed the existing rails from the seat and sat it directly on the floor, as far back as it could go (against the rear seat shelf) - this allowed about 10cm clearance between the top of my helmet and the lower-most part of the sunroof assembly, but did not allow me to see the bonnet. I could drive like this but it may prove difficult to see the track. I tried with around 30cm of books on top of the seat and this still allowed a decent amount of headroom but I could then see the front edge of the bonnet and the ground about 5m in front of the car, perfect.

I am going to use two bars as pictured above for the seat mounts; one can be RHS but because of the shape of the floor, the front mount needs to be angle iron welded in. I will then fit some angle iron to the seats themselves so that it sits on top of these bars - the angle will be bolted to the seats, and then the seats and this angle will sit in place and be bolted at each side of the seat, to allow the seat to be easily removed. I was initially going to bolt from under the floor but if that leaves exposed bolt heads there's a risk of them grinding or being snapped off if the car bottoms out. I still may use these rails as the mounts and cut an access hole in the underside of the floor to access the bolt heads, this should protect them enough to be OK to use this way.

While I started making the seat mounts, Fletcher came around and cut up an old table for some scrap RHS, which Michael H proceeded to turn into the battery box you see above. To help isolate the battery and the fuel, the battery will be run inside the car. I still have to look into sealing and ventilating it to somewhere outside the cabin - I believe I should be able to vent it to one of the C pillars as they have ventilation ducts there standard.

As it sits at the moment, I don't have any angle to make up the front "bar" mount, and I have to finish welding in the RHS bar as well. Once the driver's seat is mounted, we will be able to begin sorting out pedals (we need to use a falcon pedalbox, as the clutch is cable operated, also the BMW accelerator assembly was attached to part of the rusted floor that has since been removed. The brake pedal from the falcon should just require a hole drilled to accept the push rod from the BMW assembly to function.